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Fortune of Fate

The other day I had a hankering for Chinese take out. Sure, it might not be the healthiest food of all the choices out there, but sometimes you just have to indulge. For the record, I did make three meals out of my dinner order, so at least there is that.

The wonderful thing about Chinese food is that, after you are done, you get to fumble around in the butcher quality brown paper bag that the food arrived in, contorting yourself just so in order to avoid the mangled construction grade staples threatening to open up your house fried rice infused arteries, and find the most magical and sage of all desserts: The fortune cookie.

I like it when my fortune cookie tells me something gratifying, like “We’re renaming soy sauce to awesomesauce in your honor” or “You put the POW in kung pao chicken.”

Sometimes though, my fortune is a real miss…

Normally when I get a bogus fortune, I just shrug it off and throw it away and don’t think about it. After all, not every fortune cookie is created equal. This one, however, was discovered to be filled with commentary.

The notion that life is on rails, and that the future is set in stone, has never sat well with me. My science mind refuses to accept that all of our paths, as complex and unique as we are, are pre-planned.

Take diabetes for example. As I sit here writing this, there is absolutely no way of knowing what my blood sugar is going to be with certainty at this same time tomorrow. I can guess, and due to my repetitive behaviors when it comes to living with my diabetes, I can make an educated prediction, but that isn’t fate. Fate would say that tomorrow, at exactly 10:07 a.m., I am going to have a low blood sugar and require someone to fling jelly beans in my general direction as if they were feeding an animal at the petting zoo. Fate would say that I am on a path toward that silly spectacle of a low, and the best I can hope for is that the jelly beans are buttered popcorn or watermelon flavored, which is much more desirable than the mothball or earwax Jelly Belly recipes.

The flip side of that coin is that maybe my fate IS to depart from the path that I have been assigned. Maybe the new path is indeed my fate, and the other path was just a ploy to make me think that it was what I was supposed to be doing. Maybe by writing this blog post, I avoid the 10:07 a.m. low and allay my fears of biting into a vomit flavored Jelly Belly in order to survive a sneaky low. If you think about it too hard, you end up flopping around in the floor with a perfect blood sugar and your brain all twisted into the shape of a plate of lo mein.

I guess what the egg drop soup boils down to is that the only fate we have is what we make of the decisions we encounter today. We use our best judgement to make the best decisions that we can, and then we react to the outcomes as they may be. Nothing is guaranteed, good or bad, and nothing is written in stone.

How we are doing with our diabetes today does not in any way dictate our tomorrow. Our choices determine our fate, not the other way around.

yes! love that last line! and for some reason, your paragraph about “maybe the new path is my fate” reminded me of that line in ‘singles’: “i think that a) you have an act and that b) not having an act is your act.”, which made me smile a whole lot so thanks for that. 🙂

Dad used to make up his own fortunes (or steal from some unknown comic’s repertoire). They all began with “Confusion say:” and ranged from the smelly (“He who fart in church must sit in own pew”) to the risqué (“Man with girl on grass have peace on earth”). Maybe we need to write a puntastic series of diabetes fortune-cookie fortunes…